Home literacy as a special language environment to ... - Springer Link

Paul P. M. Leseman/Anna F. Scheele/Aziza Y. Mayo/Marielle H. Messer

Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment to Prepare Children for School Summary The present study examined the relationship between language and literacy activities at home and the emergence of so called academic language in a sample of 68 four-year-old Dutch children. The focus was on children’s understanding and production of narrative texts, seen as a common ageappropriate pre-academic text genre. Home language and literacy was measured with a short questionnaire, administered in personal interviews with the mothers. Other measures were the family’s socioeconomic status (SES), children’s receptive vocabulary and working memory. Children’s productive language in narrative text (re)telling already revealed many features of academic language. Furthermore, moderate to strong correlations were found between children’s emergent academic language and the language and literacy activities at home. Multiple regression analyses indicated that, in addition to working memory, home talking and reading predicted children’s vocabulary, and especially children’s text comprehension and text (re)telling. Finally, main and interaction-effects of working memory and home language and literacy on emergent academic language were examined. Although the results were not conclusive regarding the expected moderator effect of working memory, they revealed that children with both low working memory capacity and low academic language input were most disadvantaged.

Zusammenfassung Elterliche Sprachkompetenz als besondere Sprachumgebung zur Heranführung des Kindes an die Schule Die vorliegende Studie untersuchte den Zusammenhang zwischen der im Elternhaus entwickelten Sprach- bzw. Lesepraxis und der Entwicklung der so genannten akademischen Sprachkompetenz, in Deutschland auch als ‚bildungssprachliche Kompetenz’ bezeichnet. Hierzu wurden in den Niederlanden insgesamt 68 Kinder im Alter von 4 Jahren untersucht. Es wurde insbesondere untersucht, inwieweit die Kinder in der Lage sind, Geschichten zu verstehen und zu produzieren. Geschichten werden im Rahmen der Studie als altersgemäße vorakademische Texte aufgefasst. Der Familiensprachgebrauch und die literarische Praxis wurden anhand eines kurzen Fragebogens und in Interviews mit den Müttern erhoben. Zusätzlich wurden der sozioökonomische Status der Familie sowie der passive Wortschatz der Kinder und deren Merkfähigkeit unter Arbeitsbedingungen (working memory) herangezogen. Die Nacherzählungen der Kinder wiesen sprachlich bereits viele Merkmale der so genannten akademischen Sprache auf. Außerdem zeigte sich ein mittlerer bis starker Zusammenhang zwischen der sich entwickelnden Sprachfähigkeit der Kinder (akademische Sprache) und den sprachlichen und literarischen Praktiken der Familie. Multiple Regressionsanalysen haben gezeigt, dass – neben dem Arbeitsgedächtnis (working memory) der Kinder insbesondere die Qualität der Sprache innerhalb der

Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 10. Jahrgang, Heft 3/2007, S. 334-355

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Familie und das gemeinsame Lesen im Elternhaus positiven Einfluss auf den Wortschatz und das Textverständnis der Kinder hatten. Außerdem wurde die Fähigkeit, Geschichten nachzuerzählen dadurch besonders gefördert. Schließlich wurde die Wirkung des Arbeitsgedächtnisses und der mitgebrachten Sprachkompetenz auf die Entwicklung einer akademischen Sprache überprüft. Obwohl die Resultate den erwarteten Effekt nicht vollends bestätigen konnten, zeigte sich, dass Kinder mit geringer Merkfähigkeit bei gleichzeitig geringem Kontakt mit akademischer Sprachpraxis im Elternhaus in besonderer Weise benachteiligt waren. Keywords: academic language; home literacy; story retelling; text comprehension; working memory.

Schlüsselwörter: akademische Sprache (Bildungssprache); Bildungsgrad der Eltern; Nacherzählungen; Textverständnis; Arbeitsgedächtnis (working memory).

Previous research has revealed firm relationships between home literacy and children’s language development, emergent literacy and later school achievement in reading and writing (BAKER et al. 2001; BUS/VAN IJZENDOORN/PELLEGRINI 1995; DE JONG/LESEMAN 2001; EVANS/SHAW/BELL 2000; FRIJTERS/BARRON/BRUNELLO 2000; KARASS/BRAUNGART-RIEKER 2005; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002; WHITEHURST/LONIGAN 1998). Home literacy, in this context, refers to a manifold of activities in families involving literacy products and literacy technologies, including among others shared book reading and name writing with children, but also adults’ own reading and writing behaviour that may serve as a model for children. Home literacy, according to several authors, also includes forms of spoken language. This concerns in particular genres of spoken language that follow to some extent the linguistic features of written language (BEALS 1997, 2001; HOFF 2006; OLSON 1991; RAVID/TOLCHINSKY 2002). Frequently studied examples are personal conversations at the dinner table, oral story telling, and discussions about topics of general interest – topics that might also occur in books, newspapers, and magazines. Current research attempts to identify which aspects of home literacy contribute to children’s development and learning. Basically, three hypotheses are tested. First, home literacy helps children to discover the principles and the conventions of use of written language, especially when parents teach children explicitly about these principles (EVANS/ SHAW/BELL 2000; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002). For instance, home literacy makes children aware of the use of arbitrary symbols (letters, written words, printed texts) to code spoken language. A significant accomplishment in early childhood, often reached long before school begins, is acquiring knowledge of the letters of the alphabet. This process probably starts with observing adults’ writing activities and is strongly related to frequently occurring practices of pointing to the letters of the child’s first name and demonstrating how to write them (BOT-DE VRIES 2006; EVANS/SHAW/BELL 2000; SÉNÉCHAL/ LEFEVRE 2002). Letter knowledge, along with well-developed phonological skills, facilitates initial reading in first and second grade (SCHNEIDER/ROTH/ENNEMOSER 2000). Second, home literacy influences children’s cognitive skills, in particular symbolic, or ab-

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P. P. M. Lesemann u.a.: Home Literacy as a Special Language Environment

stract thinking. This, in turn, may explain the broad effects on later school achievement. Discussing a story, finding explanations for certain events, inferring states of mind of actors in the story, or anticipating next events to come in a narrative involves cognitive distancing, that is, a cognitive shift from the immediate situation and from what is literally given or depicted to symbolic representations and reasoning (PELLETIER/ ASTINGTON 2004; HAMMETT/VAN KLEECK/HUBERTY 2003; VAN KLEECK et al. 1997; LESEMAN/DE JONG 1998; SIGEL/STINSON/KIM 1993). Thus, according to this hypothesis, broadly conceived home literacy promotes school achievement via enhanced cognitive ability. The third hypothesis is the topic of the present study. Home literacy, including particular forms of spoken language interactions in the family, is presupposed to provide children with a special kind of language input at the lexical, grammatical, and textual level. A convenient term for the kind of language meant here is ‘academic language’, because many linguistic features, as will be argued, are shared with the language in instruction situations and textbooks in school, and with formal language use in newspapers, books, and official media. For instance, storybooks that are read to children contain rare words that have a special technical sense. Through repeated shared book reading they may become part of children’s vocabulary. Storybooks contain texts, that is, pieces of coherently connected discourse conveying complex language acts – narratives, statements, or arguments. Learning how to relate words, how to analyze the meaning of sentences, how to connect sentences, and how to infer implicit knowledge in order to understand texts, while being supported by accompanying illustrations or ‘scaffolding’ adults, may contribute to language and reading comprehension (HOFF 2006; SÉNÉCHAL/LEFEVRE 2002). The current interest in the emergence of academic language as a mediating link between exposure to home literacy and (later) school achievement, arises from findings in previous studies that show wide ranging effects of home literacy that are not confined to emergent literacy and initial reading. LESEMAN and DE JONG (2001) found in a Dutch sample that broadly conceived home literacy not only predicted decoding and reading comprehension, but also math achievement in primary school. DE JONG and LESEMAN (2001; LESEMAN/DE JONG 2004) found long lasting effects of early home language and literacy on reading comprehension many years later, in grade 3 of primary school, even after controlling for cognitive ability (working memory and nonverbal intelligence), phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and first and third grade decoding skill. Moreover, whereas the effects of early home literacy on decoding decreased over time, probably as a result of effective instruction in this subject, the effects of early home literacy on reading comprehension increased. As these effects were independent of general cognitive skills (e.g., intelligence and working memory), the acquisition of academic language fostered by particular home activities might be an explanation. Similar findings have been reported by SÉNÉCHAL and LEFEVRE (2002), SNOW (1991, 1999) and STORCH and WHITEHURST (2002) and have led them to conclude that literacy development follows (at least) two distinct trajectories, one associated with the technical aspects of reading and one associated with language comprehension. Although vocabulary is at the heart of the second trajectory, evidence is accumulating that grammatical knowledge, such as knowledge of verb frames and grammatical morphemes, is needed as well in order to bootstrap unknown word meanings (BLOOM 2000; HOFF/NAIGLES 2002; HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002). Moreover, with increasing age, vocabulary acquisition concerns, in particular, words with complex meanings that can only be fully grasped by understanding and integrating the multiple ways in which these words are used in spoken or written aca-


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demic texts. Learning this, so called ‘deep’, vocabulary from context is an important accomplishment in the later grades of primary school and depends on the ensemble of lexical, grammatical, and textual skills of children (VERHALLEN/SCHOONEN 1998; SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004; VERMEER 2001). In sum, the purpose of the present study was to examine if home literacy does indeed contribute to the early beginnings of academic language in young children.

Emergent academic language The notion of academic language, as used in this article, is derived from the Functional Grammar (FG) approach in linguistics (cf. HALLIDAY 1994; SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). Academic language, according to this approach, refers to a special register of the language that at the lexical, morpho-syntactic and textual level differs fundamentally from other registers, such as the register of everyday interpersonal communication. The notion of register emphasizes the interrelatedness of the purpose and content of communication, the social context and communicative expectations of the audience, and the proper linguistic means to convey the content to an audience in a particular situation. The interrelatedness of cognitive content, social context and linguistic form is regarded as functional, meaning that the use of appropriate linguistic structures facilitates effective and efficient communication. Academic language, in this view, is especially suited to convey – either in spoken or written form – cognitively complex information in context-poor – or ‘decontextualized’ – circumstances to a distant or unfamiliar audience that expects truthfulness, expertise and authority. SCHLEPPEGRELL (2004), using HALLIDAY’s FG framework, analyzed the linguistic features of academic language use in instruction situations, exercises, essays, and text books in primary and secondary school, and compared these with the linguistic characteristics of ordinary interactive-interpersonal communication. Some of the main features are summarized below. At the lexical level, academic language is characterized by the use of specific, technical words (e.g. ‘the industrial revolution’), by lexical and grammatical strategies of condensing information (‘the tiny, old, worried history teacher’), and by the use of explicit and specific references to time and space (‘In the 18th century, in the capital of France, the guillotine …’) in order to establish a shared frame of reference with the audience. As a result, academic discourse consists of relatively information-dense sentences that contain many content words compared to utterances in interactive talk. At the morpho-syntactic level, academic language differs from interpersonal communication with respect to the relatively frequent use of elaborate forms of tense and aspect to further elaborate the frame of reference. Also typical is the frequent use of the declarative, persuasive or argumentative mood of the verb predicate, as a way to code authority and expertise, and the use of particular adverbs and auxiliaries to represent the speaker’s or writer’s stance and epistemological attitude (for instance, whether what is said is considered a fact or a possibility). In addition, academic language is typified by the more frequent use of coordinate, relative and subordinate clause combining to express in a condensed way complex meaning propositions. Mostly this also involves the use of connectives that express logical relationships, such as addition, conjunction, disjunction, temporal and logical conditionality, causality, contrast, or comparison. Finally, at the

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textual level, academic language more often has the form of a monologue than a dialogue, requiring a speaker or writer to construct relatively long stretches of cohesive discourse and to structure the discourse in a narrative, hierarchical or argumentative way. Although young children, generally, are not yet confronted with academic language use in formal instruction situations, it is presupposed here that several forms of informal oral and literate language used in family routines support them in the process of initial acquisition of the lexical, grammatical, and textual structures of academic language. Frequently occurring activities in the home environment, such as talking about children’s experiences, sharing memories, explaining and discussing topics of general interest to children (like animals or dinosaurs), reveal linguistic features that resemble academic language use in instruction situations (BEALS 1997, 2001; HADEN/HAINE/FIVUSH 1997). Verbally reconstructing experiences and memories, for instance, requires clarification of the context of reference. It also requires coherent – narrative, logical, hierarchical – ordering of the sequence of events that is reported, and explanation of spatial, causal, and intentional relationships that are crucial for understanding (GAUVAIN 2001; HADEN/HAINE/FIVUSH 1997). Talking about topics of interest affords the use of specific, technical vocabulary, the use of conventional definitions, and complex sentences that express abstract relationships, functions, and processes (cf. SNOW/KURLAND 1996; WEIZMAN/SNOW 2001). Shared book reading not only means fun and emotionally satisfying interactions, but it also presents the child with coherently interrelated sentences that usually contain many new, often specific and rare words in a semantically rich context that helps the child to grasp the elaborate meanings of these words (WEIZMAN/SNOW 2001). Moreover, shared book reading often sets the stage for talking about extratextual, but semantically related topics of general interest stimulating the use of specific, rare vocabulary and elaborate grammatical constructions (HAMMETT/VAN KLEECK/HUBERTY 2003; LESEMAN/DE JONG 1998). Illustrations of the complex language used in children’s storybooks are presented in Figure 1. Figure 1: Examples of academic language use in picture books for children in the preschool age. (…) Men and machines began work as lorries tipped mountains of bricks and sand, drainpipes and planks, ladders and poles, and piles of tiles over the grass and wild flowers (…) From: Molly Brett (1962): Tom Tit moves house. London: The Medici Society Ltd. (…) The strange craft floated gently downstream, sometimes turning in an eddy as if taking part in an old-world dance, sometimes lingering against the water-reeds, but always going on and carrying the friends further and further from home and always nearer to the sea (…) From: Racey Helps (1970): Pinny’s holiday. London: The Medici Society Ltd. (…) When frog finds a teddy bear all alone in the forest, he takes him home. He plays football with him in the daytime, and tells him stories in the evening to teach the little bear to talk, which indeed he does! One day he doesn’t want to play anymore, or to say anything. He wants to go home, but that doesn’t mean he can’t come back again, does it? (…) From: Max Velthuijs (2004): Frog finds a friend. London: Andersen Press. (…) The Maiasaura mother dinosaur has been guarding her eggs for many weeks. Now, one by one, her babies crack through their shells and wriggle out into the huge nest. Some stop to nibble at the blanket of rotting plants that has been keeping them warm. Others peer over the tip of the nest to take their first look at the world, 75 million years ago (…) From: Christopher Maynard (1998): My best book of dinosaurs. London: Kingfisher Publications Plc.


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Socioeconomic and individual differences Several studies have revealed that home literacy varies between families, both in amount and content, as a function of parents’ own uses of literacy and traditions of talking, their education, jobs and involvement in the practices of their wider cultural and religious community (HEATH 1983; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006; RAVIV/KESSENICH/MORRISON 2004; SYLVA et al. 2004). Although, at least in the industrialized countries, forms of literacy are present in virtually all families, families may differ strongly in the opportunities they provide to their children to learn about the formal and informal aspects of literacy (ANDERSON/STOKES 1984; PURCELL-GATES 1996). The use of literacy may be mainly instrumental (e.g., using the television guide, reading advertisements) or, in contrast, also serve informative and educational goals (e.g., reading newspapers and text books). Similarly, talking with children is ubiquitous in most families, yet differences between families may arise regarding the predominant functions of talking. For instance, in some families, social and instrumental talk may be far more frequent than informative and educational talk (CRAIN-THORESON/DAHLIN/POWELL 2001; HEATH 1983; HOFF 2006; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006). Therefore, of particular interest are differences between families in the types, or genres, of talking and reading parents and children engage in regularly. Consistent with the functional linguistic approach, we presuppose that the use of academic language is more strongly promoted by genres of talking that are about distant situations, such as past experiences and memories, about fictitious situations, as in fairy tale telling, or about topics of general interest, than by other genres. In the same vein, we presuppose that reading narrative fiction, and education and information books with the child stimulates the use of academic language more than reading comic books, glossy magazines, advertisement papers, and other forms of printed language (PURCELL-GATES 1996). The present study stands in a long tradition of sociological, sociolinguistic, and educational research of social class and ethnic differences in school achievement as related to home language and literacy (cf. BERNSTEIN 1977; BOURDIEU/PASSERON 1977; HEATH 1983). The aim of the present study was to deepen understanding of the role of home language and literacy by applying a functional linguistic framework (cf. SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). In addition to language and literacy, other home environmental factors are also relevant for children’s language and literacy development, in particular, and their school achievement, in general. Several studies have documented the negative effects on school adjustment of factors such as poverty, health problems, parenting stress, and non-responsive parenting (see for recent reviews BRADLEY/CORWYN 2002; BROOKS-GUN/ MARKMAN 2005; LANDRY/SMITH/SWANK 2003). A focus on language and literacy at home, however, is justified, because they concern the most influential home factors underlying the ‘education gap’ between children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds (BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005). Acquiring the linguistic features of academic language is a special case of general language acquisition. While acknowledging that major controversies in language acquisition research are far from resolved (cf. TOMASELLO 2003), we assume that, especially in the case of emergent academic language, special language input is required to provide the young language learner with sufficient tokens and types of the lexical, grammatical, and textual forms of academic language that are rare in ordinary interpersonal language use (HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002; RAVID/TOLCHINSKY 2002; SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). In ad-

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dition, language learning not only depends on input, but also on children’s ability to learn from input. Current research focuses in particular on the role of working memory, as a domain-general information processing system involved in learning in many areas, including language (ADAMS/GATHERCOLE 2000; BADDELEY 2003). Differences between children in their capacity to store verbal information temporarily, while operating on the stored information and integrating temporary representations in long term memory, was found to predict differences in the rate of development of several aspects of language, such as receptive and productive vocabulary, specificity of vocabulary, mean length of utterances and syntactic diversity. In addition, working memory is involved in understanding text, because of the role of working memory in the construction of an episodic mental representation (BADDELEY 2003) or mental situation model (KINTSCH 2004) of the text. Having a global understanding of a text is especially important for learning the elaborate, ‘deep’ meanings of abstract words and expressions. Although most research has concentrated on verbal working memory, recent results from our own lab with young children who had to answer comprehension questions about a narrative text (VLAARDINGERBROEK et al. 2007) and studies of reading comprehension with older children (GOFF/PRATT/ONG 2005) suggest that visuo-spatial working memory is also involved in text understanding, because constructing episodic representations involves integration and representation of visual, spatial, and kinaesthetic information as well. To the best of our knowledge, no studies to date have examined the joint effects of input and working memory on emergent academic language. Yet, knowing how both factors are involved in emergent academic language is important for understanding differences between children, for identifying children at increased risk for school failure, and for preventative and remedial education. Therefore, this was the object of the study presented here.

Research questions and hypotheses We presuppose that most parents, either intentionally or unintentionally, start preparing their young children for academic language use long before children enter primary school. Particular genres of talking and reading in the family provide the main contexts for this. More specifically, we presuppose that the amount of talking with the child about personal experiences, memories and stories, and about topics of general interest, on the one hand, and reading narrative books, picture books, and information books to the child, on the other hand, are the main ways of providing the special language input that children need to acquire the beginnings of academic language. As a consequence, children’s language use is already expected to reveal some of the features of academic language as a function of this special language input at an early age. Previous research has revealed differences in home language and literacy between families, which strongly correlate, among other factors, with socioeconomic status. In the present study we are particularly interested in the role of home language and literacy as a mediating proximal process between socioeconomic status and academic language development. Based on previous research (cf. DE JONG/LESEMAN 2001; LESEMAN/DE JONG 1998; RAVIV/KESSENICH/ MORRISON 2004), we expect that effects of SES on children’s academic language development can be largely, but perhaps not fully (SYLVA et al. 2004), explained by differences in broadly conceived home literacy. Finally, children’s domain-general ability to


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learn from input is presupposed to be an additional source of variance in emergent academic language. More specifically, in addition to the main effects of working memory, we also expect to find interaction effects indicating that children profit differentially from academic language input depending on their working memory capacity. The present study was set up to examine these hypotheses focusing on four-year-old children’s ability in understanding and producing narrative texts. The choice for the narrative text genre was motivated by the consideration that for children of this age narratives are the most common type of pre-academic texts. However, it should be noted in advance that future research should also include other text genres. In the subsequent sections we will try to answer the following research questions: (1) Do four-year-old children show the beginnings of academic language in narrative text comprehension and production? (2) Is children’s emergent academic language related to particular home language and literacy activities, and do these activities mediate effects of SES on emergent academic language? (3) Is children’s emergent academic language also related to domain-general cognitive ability, more specifically – to working memory, and does working memory also mediate effects of SES on emergent academic language? (4) Does children’s working memory moderate learning academic language from academic language input?

Method Subjects. The present study involved 68 Dutch speaking four-year-old children living in the city of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, who had just started in the kindergarten department of primary school. The children were recruited in two steps. First, using a list of addresses made available by the municipality of Rotterdam, primary schools were contacted with the request to participate in the study. Of the 88 contacted schools, 31 were willing to participate. The positive response rate was 35%, a normal response rate in research with primary schools in the Netherlands. The main reason for refusing participation was the expected workload. Second, in each classroom two to four children were randomly selected for participation in the study. Their parents were asked for written consent. The positive response rate was 80%.

Measurements Vocabulary. The Diagnostic Test of Bilingualism of the national educational testing service, CITO, was used to assess children’s receptive Dutch vocabulary. The test has a similar format as the well-known Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The test-assistant mentions a target word and the child is required to point to one out of four pictures, presented on a computer screen, that he or she thinks represents the target word. Test words, 30 in all, were derived from a large database of words considered by teachers to be im-

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portant for successful participation in primary school and for understanding instruction in school subjects. CRONBACH’s alpha of the test was .83. Working memory. A Dutch version of the Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA), developed by ALLOWAY, GATHERCOLE and PICKERING (2006), was used to measure children’s digit span (recalling random series of numbers between 1 and 9, with series increasing in length), visuo-spatial span (remembering the locations of a previously presented dot in a series of 4 x 4 matrices presented on a screen, with an increasing number of places in the matrix in which the dot was successively presented), verbal processing (remembering the first word of an increasing number of spoken sentences, while deciding about the semantic correctness or incorrectness of the last presented sentence), and visuospatial processing (remembering the locations of a series of three icons presented on a screen, while deciding which icon does not belong in the series). Test-retest reliabilities were between .81 and .84 (ALLOWAY/GATHERCOLE/PICKERING 2006). The intercorrelations between the four measures ranged from .35 to .55. For the present purpose, test scores were combined by addition after z-transformation into a single measure of working memory with a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1. CRONBACH’s alpha of the new measure was .69. Narrative text comprehension. The test-assistant read a story to the child using an ageappropriate narrative picture book with pictures and text (approximately 350 words). The story was about a cat, Loekie, who wants to play, first with a fly, than with a bird, causing a lot of turmoil in the house. After reading the story, the test-assistant asked the child questions about the story, 10 in all. The questions were at first open-ended (“What did Loekie think when he saw the fly?”). If the child did not answer the question, a closed alternative question was posed (“Did Loeki want to play with the fly when he first saw him?”). A correct answer to the open question was awarded 2, a correct answer to the closed alternative 1, and no answer or an obviously wrong answer 0. CRONBACH’S alpha of the test was .76. Narrative text production. After the comprehension test, children were asked to read two books to a doll, Ernie, a character from Sesame Street who was well known to all children. The first book was the book used in the comprehension test. The second book was also about Loekie, but contained a new story (Loekie meets the cat of the new neighbors who just have moved in the house next door). Both books were recently released and not already known to the children. Children were asked to pretend read and to tell the stories to Ernie using the pictures in the books. The test-assistant provided support by playing the doll Ernie, showing interest and sometimes voicing Ernie to stimulate the child to tell more by using general prompts (“tell me more”). The story telling was recorded on videotape, and transcribed and coded afterwards in the laboratory. Utterances of the child were defined as units of speech containing a single, sometimes complex meaning proposition. A coding scheme, based on SCHLEPPEGRELL (2004), but adapted to the age of the children in this study, was used to evaluate each utterance with regard to the following coding categories (The coding scheme of the present study is a shortened version of an extensive coding scheme developed within the DASH-project (2006). The coding manual, in English, can be obtained from the authors.):


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– Number of content words in each utterance (all nouns, verbs, adjectives and count words and a selection of adverbs with a clear, expressible meaning). – Use of either no, deictic (‘here’, ‘this one’), explicit but non-specific (‘somewhere’), or explicit and specific references to time and place (‘under the pile of leaves’). – Use of verb predicate tense and aspect (subcategories: no verb, present simple, present perfect, past simple, past perfect, present future, or past future tense). – Use of verb predicate mood (subcategories: no verb, declarative, persuasive, interrogative or imperative verb predicate mood). – Use of connectives (subcategories: additive, temporal, causal, contrastive, and comparative connectives). – Use of clause combining (subcategories: coordinate, subordinate, including relative and embedded clause combining). In addition, coders rated the discourse produced by the child during storytelling in a holistic manner on the following dimensions: – Textual cohesion of the story told by the child using a 7-point rating scale, with scale point 1 meaning ‘very low cohesion between separate utterances, virtually all utterances are semantically or linguistically unrelated’, and 7 meaning ‘the discourse is highly coherent, all utterances together forming one complex statement’. – Degree of abstractness of the story on a 4-point rating scale derived from BLANK, ROSE and BERLIN (1978), with scale point 1 meaning that the story produced by the child sticks closely to the immediate situation, e.g. merely labeling the pictures, and scale point 4 meaning that the child reasons about not directly observed aspects of the story. – Narrative competence of the child using SULZBY’s (1986) 12-point scale of narrative reading development with scale point 1 meaning ‘the child separately labels depicted items without attempt to connect them into a meaningful whole’, and 7, the highest observed score in this study, meaning ‘the child does not read, but tells the picture book in a way that closely resembles actual reading’. Intercoder reliability was determined on the story (re)telling of five children. Two coders independently coded over 200 utterances and 30 holistic evaluations (five children × two stories × three ratings). The mean intercoder correlation was 0.67 (p < .01; range 0.40 to 0.91) for the utterance-based coding. The mean intercoder agreement of the ratings, based on exactly matching scores, was 81% (chance level 14% to 25%). For the purpose of the present article, means and frequencies were computed on those utterances that were part of the story (re)telling, excluding side remarks or procedural utterances, largely inaudible or not understandable utterances, as well as simple yes or no utterances. Home language and literacy. A short questionnaire was administered in a personal interview with the caregiver of the child who was most in charge of daily care and supervision, in the present study always the mother. A number of questions addressed the home learning environment, including language and literacy activities, but also counting and math, and a number of other subjects not further considered here. Two scales were constructed by computing the mean of the items included in these scales; a few missing values were substituted by the mean of the scale. The scale talking represented the selfreported mean frequency of mothers’ talking with their children about personal experi-

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ences and shared memories, about topics of general interest (e.g., history, biology), and telling stories and fairy tales. The scale consists of five items with a CRONBACH’s alpha of .85. A sample item is: “How frequently do you talk with your child about what he/she experiences in school?” Scale point 1 represents ‘almost never’, whereas 5 stands for ‘at least daily, sometimes several times a day’. The scale reading measured the self-reported frequency of shared reading with the child, including books containing narratives (as in picture books), informative books, and ABC-letter books. A sample item is: “How frequently do you read a picture book to your child?” Answers were coded on the same fivepoint scale. CRONBACH’s alpha with 7 items was .75. Socioeconomic status and other family background characteristics. The highest educational level attained by the parents was used to construct a measure of the family’s socioeconomic status (SES) by computing the mean level of both parents’ education. In case of single parent families, the measure was based on the education level of the mother only. The mean educational level ranged from 1 “only primary school” to 6 “university degree”. Educational level of father and mother correlated r = .61 (p < .01) in the present sample. In addition, information was collected about the employment status of the parents and the composition of the family. Procedures. Children were individually tested by trained female research-assistants, students in psychology and educational sciences, in a quiet room in the school during school time on two days in a two-week period. Both test sessions took about 75 minutes. Tests were administered in a fixed order using laptop computers. Pictures and visual stimuli were projected on the computer screen, voiced target words and sentences presented through the computer’s speakers. Children’s answers were directly entered in a data file. After each test, children received a small gift, e.g. a booklet with attractive, colorful stickers. The story comprehension and (re)telling tasks were conducted in an informal atmosphere, while assistant and child were seated at a table. The doll Ernie was used to playfully stimulate the child. The book reading was videotaped with a small digital camera on a tripod, standing about 1.5 meters away from the table. The interviews with the mothers were held in school in the morning, after the mothers had brought the children to the classroom or, in few cases, at home. Female research assistants interviewed the mothers using a short, semi-structured questionnaire. Analysis plan. The first research question, whether the four-year-old children in this study showed emergent academic language, will be answered by presenting the mean scores of the narrative text comprehension task and the mean numbers and frequencies of academic language features found for the narrative text production task. The results of correlation analysis will be presented to answer the second and third research question, concerning the relationships of academic language in text comprehension and production with particular genres of talking and reading at home and with children’s working memory capacity. In addition, multiple regression analysis will be used to address the question whether effects of SES on emergent academic language are mediated by working memory and patterns of home talking and reading. Finally, the question whether what children learn from the talking and reading activities at home is moderated by their working memory capacity will be answered by testing the interaction effect with an analysis of variance.


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Results Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and score ranges of the variables included in this study. The mean socioeconomic status (SES) was 4, representing an average SES in the present sample at the intermediate vocational or general training level. 69% of the mothers and 98% of the fathers had a paid (part time) job, which is representative of the non-immigrant, Dutch speaking population in the Netherlands. About 18% of the families was a single parent family, which is slightly above the national average for families with young children. The mean number of children in the family was 2.2, also slightly higher than the national average (which is just below 2). The reported mean frequencies of talking and reading to the child in different genres were around 3, representing an average frequency of the different talking and reading activities subsumed in these scales of once a month to once a week. Note that some activities included in the scales might actually have occurred more often. The mean age of the children was 52 months (i.e., 4 years and 4 months). The sex ratio was uneven. More boys than girls were involved in the study. The mean scores on the working memory composite and the vocabulary test did not reveal bottom or ceiling effects. Table 1: Home and child characteristics: means/frequencies, standard deviations, and observed score ranges (n= 68) m/f

sd

observed range

Home characteristics SES (mean educational level of both parents) Percentage of mothers with a (part time) paid job Percentage of fathers with a (part time) paid job Number of children at home Frequency shared reading Frequency shared talking

4.1 69.2 97.9 2.2 3.1 2.9

1.3 46.5 14.4 1.1 1.1 1.1

1.5-6.0 – – 1-6 1.0-5.0 1.0-4.9

Child characteristics Age of the child (in months) Percentage of boys Working memory composite (z-score)

52.1 64.7 0.0

2.8 0.5 1.0

48-62 – -1.7-3.0

Receptive academic language Receptive vocabulary Narrative text comprehension

12.1 12.8

3.6 4.8

5-19 2.0-20.0

Productive academic language Mean number of content words per utterance Mean% utterances with explicit reference Mean% utterances with past / perfect tense Mean% utterances in declarative mood Mean% utterances with at least one connective Mean% utterances with two combined clauses Rating textual cohesion Rating degree of abstraction (Blank-scale) Rating narrative skill (Sulzby-scale)

2.5 36.4 34.0 79.7 7.2 7.0 3.5 1.9 2.8

0.5 18.0 26.1 15.1 6.7 7.0 1.3 0.5 1.2

1.2-3.5 5.0-82.0 0.0-97.0 21.0-100.0 0.0-29.0 0.0-29.0 1.0-6.5 1.0-3.5 1.0-7.0

The results of the narrative text comprehension and production tasks are most of interest. The mean score on the comprehension task was 12.8, with a theoretical maximum of 20. The standard deviation as well as the observed score range indicated big inter-individual

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differences in narrative text comprehension (observed range 1.9 – 20.0). Table 1 also gives the pooled results of the two text (re)telling tasks, based on an average number of 48 utterances per child (sd = 16.4; range 13 to 102). The mean number of content words per utterance was 2.5; the observed range was again considerable. Children frequently used explicit non-deictic references to time and place in their stories. No reference to time or place at all was found in on average 30% of the utterances. The vast majority of verb predicate tenses used were present, present perfect, and past simple (only very few other tenses, such as past perfect, present future, and past future were found). For the purpose of this article, present perfect, past simple, and past perfect were pooled in a single measure, namely the use of past/perfect tense. On average 34% of children’s utterances used a different tense than present simple, whereas on average about 18% of children’s utterances contained no verb at all. However, it should again be noted that children differed vastly in this respect. Children’s utterances were in majority in the declarative mood. Interrogatives and imperatives, more characteristic of interpersonal language use, were quite infrequent and, therefore, not further considered here. The use of connectives, and, related to that, the use of clause combining was much less frequent, especially subordinate clause combining. Therefore, coordinate and subordinate clause combining were pooled. On average 7% of children’s utterances were marked by clause combining. Note that also for this aspect the range of scores was considerable, with a few children using clause combining in almost 30% of their utterances. Finally, the holistic ratings indicated that children even at this young age were already quite able to produce a reasonably cohesive discourse, to distance themselves cognitively from the immediate situation, mainly by describing inferred relations between entities and/or persons in their stories and by inferring the states of mind of the persons, and to apply the structure of a narrative in their story telling (none of the children attempted to really read). Table 2 presents the intercorrelations of all coded academic language features in children’s story (re)telling. Overall, most features were moderately to strongly intercorrelated. Some of the stronger correlations partly reflected structural interdependencies. For instance, included in the number of content words per utterance were verbs (also counted in the category past/perfect tense), adverbs (frequently part of an explicit reference), and connectives (also counted separately, also often involved in clause combining). Principal components analysis yielded a first component that explained 56% of the variance (with most features having standardised factor regression scores > .20) and a second component that explained an additional 15% of the variance (with use of explicit reference, past (perfect) tense and declarative mood having the biggest factor scores). CRONBACH’s alpha of all features was .83. The results indicated that academic language indeed is a rather homogeneous construct, at least at this age and at least with respect to narrative story (re)telling. A composite measure was constructed for further analyses as the sum of all academic language features after z-transformation. The correlation of this composite with the text comprehension measure was r = .43 (p < .01), suggesting that productive academic language use shares a common core with receptive academic language use, but also includes different component skills. In summary, to answer the first research question, the results confirm that even at the age of four, while not yet attending formal education, children implicitly (narrative text comprehension) and explicitly (in narrative text (re)telling) showed emergent academic language.


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Table 2: Pearson intercorrelations of academic language features in narrative text (re)telling (n = 68) 1 Content words 2 Explicit reference 3 Past / perfect tense 4 Declarative mood 5 Connectives 6 Clause combining 7 Textual cohesion 8 Abstraction degree 9 Narrative skill

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

.63 ** --

.52 ** .66 ** --

.70 ** .58 ** .47 ** --

.56 ** .19 .27 * .27 * --

.58 ** .36 ** .24 + .38 ** .78 ** --

.66 ** .48 ** .46 ** .46 ** .60 ** .46 ** --

.58 ** .40 ** .33 ** .56 ** .52 ** .59 ** .70 ** --

.61 ** .43 ** .42 ** .36 ** .60 ** .53 ** .73 ** .63 ** --

+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01

The correlations of children’s receptive vocabulary, narrative text comprehension, and use of academic language in narrative text production with the working memory composite, the family’s SES, and the indicators of the home language and literacy environment are presented in Table 3. Working memory, as expected, was rather strongly related to vocabulary and text comprehension, and moderately to most of the academic language features in text production. SES correlated weakly to moderately with vocabulary, text comprehension, and most features of academic language use in text production. The results of the correlation analyses with talking and reading at home revealed an interesting pattern. Whereas talking at home was stronger associated with receptive vocabulary and narrative text comprehension, reading at home was stronger associated with most features of academic language use in narrative text production. As a consequence, reading at home was also stronger correlated with the academic language composite than talking at home. Moreover, talking and reading at home were both stronger correlated with the receptive and productive language measures than SES. Table 3: Pearson correlations of vocabulary, narrative text comprehension, and academic language features in narrative text (re)telling with working memory, SES, and home language and literacy activities (n = 68) Working Memory

SES

Talking at Home

Reading at Home

Receptive vocabulary Narrative text comprehension

.52 ** .56 **

.33 ** .40 **

.47 ** .63 **

.29 ** .56 **

Content words Explicit reference Past / perfect tense Declarative mood Connectives Clause combining Textual cohesion Abstraction degree Narrative skill

.37 ** .31 ** .26 * .28 * .21 + .20 + .42 ** .27 * .17

.36 ** .23 + .21 + .32 ** .09 .01 .28 * .21 + .15

.52 ** .24 + .27 * .43 ** .28 * .33 ** .49 ** .47 ** .27 *

.54 ** .22 + .21 + .51 ** .34 ** .34 ** .53 ** .51 ** .48 **

Academic language (composite)

.38 **

.29 *

.49 **

.55 **

+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01

Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the joint effects of working memory and the home language and literacy environment on children’s receptive vo-

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cabulary, narrative text comprehension, and academic language use in narrative text production, using the academic language composite. As the talking and reading scales were strongly intercorrelated in this sample, r = .77 (p < .01), both were also pooled into one variable, namely talking and reading at home, in order to avoid bias due to multicollinearity. In all analyses, SES was added as an additional predictor in the second analysis step to determine to what extent working memory and home language and literacy mediated effects of SES. To test the mediation hypothesis, two conditions should be met: first, the independent predictor should be moderately to strongly correlated with the mediators; note that in this study the correlation of SES with working memory was r = .41 (p < .01) and with the pooled variable talking and reading at home r = .45 (p < .01); and second, the predictor should not predict an additional, statistically significant amount of variance in the dependent after taking the variance predicted by the mediators into account. The results of the multiple regression analyses are presented in Table 4. Working memory, as an indicator of children’s domain-general cognitive ability, and talking and reading at home, as an indicator of the home language and literacy environment, together predicted statistically significantly children’s vocabulary, text comprehension, and academic language use in text production. The total amount of predicted variance was substantial, with R2’s ranging from 0.31 to 0.49 (p’s < .01). Working memory was a strong predictor of both vocabulary and narrative text comprehension, but not of academic language use in narrative text production. Home talking and reading was a strong predictor of both narrative text comprehension and narrative text production, but a less strong predictor of vocabulary. SES predicted no statistically significant additional amounts of variance in the dependents, suggesting that the measured home language and literacy activities, together with children’s cognitive ability, fully accounted for early arising socioeconomic differences in academic language. Thus, to answer the second and third research question, home literacy in its broad conception and working memory were moderately to strongly related to emergent academic language, while fully mediating the effects of SES. Table 4: Multiple regression analysis with vocabulary, narrative text comprehension, and academic language use in narrative text (re)telling as dependents, in two steps; R2-change by step, βs of the final model, and R2-total (n = 68) Vocabulary 2

ΔR 1. Working memory 1. Talking & Reading 2. SES

.32 ** .02

Total R2

.32 **

Narrative text comprehension

Final β .41 ** .26 * .15

2

ΔR

.48 ** .01 .49 **

Final β .35 ** .47 ** .09

Academic language in text retelling Δ R2 Final β .32 ** .00

.19 .45 ** .01

.31 **

+ p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01

Finally, to explore moderation effects of working memory, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted with a pooled measure of z-transformed narrative text comprehension and production as dependent variable. Text comprehension and text production (r = .43; p < .01; see above) were joined for this analysis to obtain a broad construct of emergent academic language that comprised both receptive and productive aspects. Working memory and talking and reading at home were recoded into two levels, below and above the me-


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dian, and included as fixed factors in the ANOVA. The results are graphically shown in Figure 2. In addition to main effects of working memory (F(1,67) = 12.13, p < .01) and talking and reading at home (F(1,67) = 15.12, p < .01), a borderline significant interaction effect was found (F(1,67) = 3.10, p < .08). Although an interaction effect was expected, the pattern provided no conclusive support for the moderation hypothesis. As Figure 2 shows, the interaction effect can be interpreted as indicating that low working memory capacity strengthens the negative effect of low academic language input (children learning even less from the relatively impoverished input), whereas high working memory capacity can partly compensate for low academic language input (children learning more efficiently from the relatively impoverished input). However, another interpretation is more likely given the pattern of scores: high academic language input can partly compensate for the negative effects of low working memory capacity, thus equalising differences between children in learning ability. According to this interpretation, the moderator effect is the reverse of what was expected: the home language and literacy environment moderates the effect of working memory on emergent academic language. In sum, the present results did not allow a conclusive answer to the fourth research question. Nonetheless, the interaction effect was a relevant finding. As Figure 2 reveals, children with below median working memory capacity and below median academic language input at home constituted a clear at risk group. The standardised difference in academic language scores, d, between the most favourable and the most unfavourable condition was about d = 1.3. Figure 2: Main and interaction effects of working memory and home language and literacy on emergent academic language use in narrative text comprehension and production (standardised composite score) 1

0,75

0,5

0,25

0

-0,25

-0,5

-0,75

-1

HOME LITERACY Lowlow Home Literacy

Low Working Working Memory low Memory

high HOME LITERACY High Home Literacy

High Memory highWorking Working Memory

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Discussion The purpose of the present study was to examine a possible mechanism underlying the broad and long lasting effects of home language and literacy on later school achievement, reported in a number of studies cited in the introduction of this article. The proposed mechanism, namely the acquisition and use of the so called academic register of the language in comprehending and producing discourse, was tested implicitly by relating children’s story comprehension to patterns of talking and reading at home, under the assumption that in order to be able to comprehend a narrative text command of the lexical, grammatical and textual features of written (academic) language to some degree is prerequisite. In addition to this, also the relation of school language vocabulary with talking and reading at home was determined. The proposed mechanism was tested explicitly by examining the relation of talking and reading at home with the use of features of academic language in the production of narratives. The results generally supported the hypothesis that home literacy in a broad sense, including oral and literate activities within genres that afford the use of academic language, indeed promotes the emergence of academic language in children’s receptive and productive narrative text processing. The family’s socioeconomic status (SES), measured by parents’ education level, was weakly to moderately related to emergent academic language, compatible with the presupposition that differences in language socialisation at home are a major cause of social class differences in school success (cf. BERNSTEIN 1977; BOURDIEU/PASSERON 1977; HEATH 1983). In addition to the older sociological and ethnographic work in this area, the present study revealed more in detail how particular practices in the family may be related to developmental outcomes. Moreover, the use of a functional linguistic framework added to the interpretation and evaluation of differences in language socialisation. In contrast to the older work, we believe that the use of particular linguistic structures is not arbitrary, or just a sign of social class consciousness, a mere matter of cultural taste, or whatsoever. Particular forms of language use, under the constraint of communicative efficiency, are functional for and, therefore, afforded by the particular goals and contexts of language use (SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). The results of the present study also confirmed the presupposition that the effects of SES, seen as a distal family background characteristic, on emergent academic language were largely mediated by proximal family processes, namely the particular language and literacy activities that parents and children were regularly engaged in. In agreement with the findings of SYLVA et al. (2004) and RAVIV/KESSENICH/MORRISON (2004), and other previous work, the effects of the proximal home activities were much stronger than the effects of SES. However, the fact that no additional explained variance was found for SES in the multiple regression analyses, should not be taken to imply that home language and literacy mediates all influences of SES, and related distal factors, on language and literacy development and later school achievement. Academic language was defined here as a particular form of language that is characterised by relatively high information density, relatively frequent use of explicit references to time and place at the lexical level, of elaborate tense and aspect, the declarative mood and clause combining at the sentence level, and of cohesiveness and distancing strategies, and narrative structuring at the text level. As was expected, the narrative text production of the four-year-old children in this study indeed revealed indications of emergent academic language as a function of home language and literacy. Emergent aca-


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demic language appeared to be a rather homogeneous construct, with all different aspects being moderately to strongly intercorrelated. From the pattern of correlations and the results of the multiple regression analyses, it can be tentatively deduced that oral forms of home literacy, such as talking about personal experiences and topics of general interest, contribute in particular to the lexical level (vocabulary, understanding text, lexical density), whereas written forms of home literacy, e.g. reading narratives and information books to the child, contribute in particular to the morpho-syntactic and textual levels of emergent academic language. A possible explanation is that the language in children’s books that is read aloud to children in sessions of shared book reading, provides comparatively more tokens and types of complex syntactic and textual structures, which is essential input for emergent academic language (HOFF 2006; HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002; SCHLEPPEGRELL 2004). We suspect that oral literacy is simpler in this regard as it still is predominantly a form of interactive-interpersonal language use. It should be noted that the present evidence is suggestive at best. Both longitudinal and experimental designs are needed to establish more firmly the causal interpretation of the correlations found. Well-established in language acquisition research is that adults finetune their language use to children’s language proficiency. Therefore, the correlations found in this study may reflect a reverse relationship: children’s academic language proficiency determines what adults provide to them. However, a number of recent studies that examined the relationships between the input and acquisition of specific linguistic structures (e.g., rare words, word order, verb tense markers, clause combining) by using a microgenetic design with many measurement points, demonstrated that parents’ finetuned input is mostly a number of days to a few weeks ahead of children’s use of the structures concerned, which provides strong support for a causal interpretation (MATTHEWS et al. 2005; THEAKSTON/LIEVEN/TOMASELLO 2003; TOMASELLO 2003; see for related findings with different research designs HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002; WEIZMAN/SNOW 2001). Correlations and multivariate regression analyses indicated that children’s domaingeneral ability, represented in this study by a composite of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory tests, is an important source of inter-individual differences in emergent academic language as well. Working memory may play two distinct roles. First, the actual achievement in the test situation – remembering and integrating the story that is told, respectively planning the story that is going to be told – may have been directly influenced by children’s working memory capacity. The capacity to represent verbal and visuospatial information temporarily in order to be available for higher order cognitive operations is crucial to the process of understanding text (BADDELEY 2003; KINTSCH 2004). Second, working memory may have indirectly influenced the results because of its role in language learning (ADAMS/GATHERCOLE 2000; VLAARDINGERBROEK et al. 2007). The strong effect of the working memory composite on children’s receptive vocabulary, tested by asking children to choose the right picture out of four, which as such does not require extensive processing at test taking, probably reflects most directly the fundamental role of working memory as moderator of learning language from language input. However, the expected interaction effect of working memory and language input on emergent academic language did not conclusively support the moderation hypothesis. Thus, perhaps the effect of working memory in more complex language tasks (text comprehension, text production) is mainly direct and situated, while concealing the cumulative indirect effects on language learning. Finally, the study revealed that children with both low academic lan-

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guage input at home and low working memory capacity had the lowest scores on the academic language tasks, and, therefore, can be considered most at risk for failure in school, especially in subjects that rely heavily upon understanding (written) academic texts. Follow-up research with the current sample is planned and will enable us to test this prediction. The present study was conducted in a sample of four-year-olds who spoke Dutch as their first language. Despite the considerable variation in socioeconomic status and related language and literacy activities at home, we suspect that including bilingual immigrant children who often come from low-literate homes (BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006), will further increase the correlations of home talking and reading with emergent academic language, demonstrating even more convincingly the importance of broadly conceived home literacy. Despite its narrow focus on only one aspect of the home learning environment and its selective sample, the present study contributes to a growing body of knowledge about the foundational role of the home learning environment for child development in several domains that foreruns school learning (BRADLEY/CORWYN 2002; BROOKS-GUN/MARKMAN 2005; LANDRY/SMITH/SWANK 2003; LESEMAN/VAN TUIJL 2006; SYLVA et al. 2004). The findings reported in this article confirm what has been found in previous studies that families differ strongly in the ways they, intentionally or unintentionally, prepare their children for school, with probably long lasting consequences. In this perspective, interest in preschool intervention programs to prevent early educational disadvantages is highly justified. However, the mixed results of current programs, and particularly the comparatively low effectiveness of familyfocused programs (BLOK et al. 2005), underscore that improvement of approach and content is needed. Based on the present results, a stronger emphasis on – that is, a higher dose of – linguistically more complex and sophisticated talking and reading activities, guided by adults and supported by appropriate materials, such as picture books and interesting objects, is recommendable. Parents and teachers (cf. HUTTENLOCHER et al. 2002) who are stimulated to use more complex language in interacting with children, help children to acquire more complex language.

Limitations and conclusion The present study was conducted with a small sample of Dutch speaking children. Home literacy was measured by a self-report questionnaire and, therefore, vulnerable to measurement error and social-desirability response tendencies. Measurements were taken on one occasion only. Longitudinal and experimental studies with larger samples, including bilingual immigrant children, using also observation measures of home language and literacy, are needed to strengthen the present tentative conclusions regarding the effects of the home environment on emergent academic language. Moreover, longitudinal research is needed to test the core assumption underlying the present study, namely that the acquisition of the academic language register indeed is important for learning in several school subjects. Finally, the central construct of academic language was measured with respect to narrative texts only in this study. Although the choice of narrative texts was ageappropriate, the hypothesis that acquisition of academic language is a mediating mechanism that can explain the well-established effects of home literacy on school achievement,


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needs to be tested with other genres as well. These limitations notwithstanding, the present study contributes some valuable insights in the way particular language and literacy activities in the family create a linguistic context for acquiring a powerful general skill, academic language, with probably broad-ranging effects on later school learning.

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